Damned
by Rhelle
Summary: For a creature beaten and bloodied will either submit, cower in terror of its master, living its life out in the shadow of such brutality...or rise up, and fight to live as the proud creature it was born. (detailing a part of Seto's life under Gozaburo)


Author's Note: Yay, so I finally finished another fic! Wow, it's only been…like…four months x.x Well, anyway, it's a Seto and Gozaburo type introspective thingy… but it's good. I promise. Just read it.

And if you were thinking this has been re-posted several times, you're right. I know I'm a bitch, but no one's reviewing and it's pissinbg me off.

Oh yes, and there is no Seto/Mokuba in it. It may seem like it at points (Seto thinking about how he loves his brother, etc.), but I assure you, there is none. I don't mind the pairing - in fact, I have greatly enjoyed many fics of it - but it simply does not suit my purpose here. So all the "love" stuff is purely platonic. I swear.

WARNING: Psychological and physical torture, lots o' dark shit, and the like. 

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Damned

"Descending into the past, without a clue,

Down to that central deadness: the despair

Older than any hope I ever knew"

~ James McAuley, _Because_

The boy did not know how long he hung there, limp as a dead thing. His arms were spread wide apart, as if he were a bird trying to fly, and secured at the wrists with chains set in the stone walls. This place was cold, but he could not feel. Body, mind, and soul, he was numb.

His chest and ribcage was a wash of red. Skin, slashed into strips, gaped open and parted to reveal the dull white of bone and the textured crimson of muscle. Old blood was crusted all over his body, across his stomach and sides, down his hips. With each new breath, fresh blood oozed out and trickled down. 

He was denied food and drink, too, when he was here. His stomach roiled, empty and sickened, and his throat was swollen with thirst. Left at the mercy of his own body, he would die soon of dehydration and starvation - if the bloodloss and pain did not kill him first.

But such trivialities no longer troubled him. He was beyond it all. He drifted in and out of the death-haze, partly alive, mostly dead.

Time went by as it always had in this place, unchecked and unmeasured. Hours, days, weeks, months, it was all the same to him.

Footsteps echoed out in the hall - the free world - drawing ever closer. Movement stirred in the boy's pale form, some deep instinct woke him. _Something wicked this way comes._

__

Of course he'd come back, he always does. He wouldn't allow death, for he knows what a mercy it would be. And he is never merciful.

Slowly, surely, his eyes opened. A deeper blue than the sea or the sky, they were beautiful - or once had been. 

There was no fire left in those eyes. Dead, empty orbs, closed doors to the mind behind them. All emotion had been beaten out of him long ago. Hate, fear, sadness, even despair, nothing was left.

A man entered the room, clearly a man of importance (and just as clearly not belonging in this place); stately, powerfully built, with silvering hair and even a rugged handsomeness. There was power in his step: here was someone who would be seen at a company dinner, or closing a business deal. He was Gozaburo Kaiba, founder and current CEO of the company that bore his name.

And yet, at the same time, there was a half-hidden shady quality to him, a threat that remained unspoken. Here also was someone who, under the pretense of a hug, would stick a knife in another man's back.

Under the pressure of the man's cold eyes, the boy's gaze dropped. That was one of the rules - _never look him in the eyes, never challenge him_ - part of this life he had lived so long he remembered no other.

But, for a heartbeat, actual emotion flashed in those eyes - fear. Primal, instinctive, the fear of a prey. The total numbing terror of a mouse that finds itself in the shadow of a hawk, of a hare that feels a hound's breath gust hot against its back. Then it was gone, and the dead indifference returned.

He hid it, but the man saw anyway. He always did. He sniffed it out like a hunter; he always found it - all that the boy hid - in the end.

In the face of the child's pain, knowing it, causing it, the man grinned. A skull's empty jack-o'-lantern grin, the smile of the killer, of madness and a kind of dark pleasure.

The boy shuddered. From the returning cold or fear, he could not say.

He faded again, fled back into the mists and luminous shadows of his mind-world. He knew what was coming.

As if from a thousand miles away, he was vaguely aware that the man stood facing him. He was saying something, the man, but the boy was too far off to hear most of it. Snippets of the harsh, mocking words still reached him, though, even through the mists.

__

"...Do you give in now..?"

The child would have laughed, if he could. That was a stupid question; there was nothing left of him to give in.

He drifted again. What else remained for him to do? He knew what was coming, what would come, sooner or later. Here, he was free from it. And here, he allowed himself to dream.

An end for it all. That was all he wanted. Death, if that was what the end would be. An end to the blood and chains and darkness, the starvation and the harsh mocking words. An end to what was really, in truth, just an extended death. It didn't matter what came after that, just so long as the pain was over.

He should not have defied the man. He knew it. It was foolish to stand in the face of such power and dominanation; nothing more would come of it but hurt and suffering. It was his own fault, he had brought it upon himself.

__

Besides, what do you have left to fight for?

That voice again, the darkness inside of him. The thoughts not his own. He closed his eyes against it, but still it remained, everywhere in him, wrapping him in itself, toying with his diminishing sanity. And he did not have the strength or the will to fight it. It raged freely now, a force he could not control.

__

Why do you live and endure it still? You have nothing left! Go ahead, die; no one would miss you!

It snagged on his awareness, that last comment, grated against his mind. It did not anger him or hurt him, just caught in his thoughts. For he knew it was not fully the truth.

There was still one creature in all the world that loved him. There was still one reason he lived.

In his mind's eye, he was Mokuba, laughing and dancing and calling Seto's name. Seto, his brother, his _niisama_. His friend.

Yes, that was why he lived. For Mokuba. For love.

For the first time in a long, long while, a smile brushed his lips.

Love can be a kind of armor sometimes, the knowledge of it and the fact that there is someone who cares about you.

Something woke within him, stirred and came to life again. What had been dead was now alive again. Let Gozaburo do what he would to him; Seto still had Mokuba.

And Mokuba would not want to see him like this, would he? Not his body, his wounds in the flesh, but the brokenness inside.

What pride and all his strength could never accomplish, love did. 

His darkness knew what he was going to do. It faded, dispersed into the corners of his mind. Left him alone to reap the consequences of his own actions.

Something, some ingrained sense of submission, snapped in him and went beyond all recall. Perhaps it was not courage he felt now, only a weariness of living in fear.

His eyes opened. He awoke and he dared.

__

If I am to live, it will be with dignity. If I am to die, it will be with the same.

He lifted his head, swung his gaze upwards, and met the man's eyes.

He could not say what it was he expected to see there - and perhaps he feared to. "Eyes are the window to the soul," had said some writer now long dead. And what kind of soul lay behind the eyes of the man who had torn Seto's life apart?

Surprise. That was what he saw first. Surprise at the boy's nerve, and a kind of shock at it; this was not supposed to be happening, just as the moon was not supposed to fight the sun for its position in the sky. It seemed incongruent in the face of a man of such power and prestige.

__

It's not supposed to be happening, Seto thought. _But it is._

There was rage, too, but Seto had been expecting that. Gozaburo had always despised it when someone had the courage to stand up to him.

The was no hate in those eyes, though, at least not hate towards the boy. There was a kind of malice, a derision towards all living things, but none of the deeply personal hate Seto had thought he would see. 

But then, for the single moment before the man raised his defenses again, Seto caught a glimpse of what lay beneath it all, an undercurrent of...nothingness. A faint sadness, the remnant of a crippling agony, and a deep, aching, emptiness. There was something of the lost child there, confused and despairing. 

It was like a cool lake in hell, not too long unknown, but too long unseen. Seto felt a rush of pity towards him. _You're just like me, aren't you? You bastard. You poor, poor bastard._

Predictably, Gozaburo raised his facade, hid again behind his mask of anger. Seto had known he would. He would show no shame, only rage. It took over again, veiling all the deep secrets in his eyes. It spread over his features, slow and cold. All trace of anything else vanished.

Some core survival instinct flashed in the boy like cold lightning deep inside, frantic voices without a body, screaming: _Stop it, you idiot! Look down, look away! Give it up!_

He should be afraid, he had every reason to be. God only knew what Gozaburo would do now.

And yet he was not. It wasn't the courage that had spurred him on in the beginning; it was less bold, less fierce, and more enduring. He had simply found an edge - the truth. He had dared, looked into the man's soul and seen all that he had hidden for so long. And something held him to that.

__

Yes, I know what his punishment will be. But better injury to the body than slow death to the soul. Better to have my dignity, even if I must suffer for it.

Gozaburo's lip lifted, a jackal's snarl, a look of raw chilling hate. He glowered at him, fury a fire in his eyes. And Seto met his gaze unwaveringly, cool and calm and fearless. And pitying.

__

Do whatever you please to me now, Gozaburo. I have seen into your soul, seen your darkest secret - you are just like me.

You break me - or try to - but you were broken in your turn, left hollow inside. Of course you would do the same to me. Pain feeds off itself; that is its nature.

So I do not hate you, Gozaburo. I pity you.

And so they met each other's eyes, saw things not seen with simple sight. They looked through each other, into a world beyond their own. Their gazes were locked in combat for eternity, or until one or the other fell. Pressure built between them, crackled in the air. 

How long did they stay that way, the boy and the man, silence and a thousand unspoken things between them? Seconds, minutes, eternities? Neither was ever sure.

It was Gozaburo who snapped first. He backed down, looked away, flicked his gaze downwards.

He looked away. He gave in.

It happened so suddenly that Seto did not at first comprehend all that it meant, and he didn't for a long time, not fully. Victory is a difficult thing to realize when one has so long suffered defeat. But any elation Seto might have felt then was washed away by fear.

Because Gozaburo did not lightly take being made the inferior. And because now he was looking through one of his pockets, looking for...something. God only knew what. God only knew what he'd do with it. Then it was out, in his hands; a blue, cylindrical-shaped thing. A lighter. A flick, and the flame appeared.

I seemed strange to see it, somehow, this little tongue of light that shone among the shadows, to see the fierce light it cast on Gozaburo's face and his own, and the darkness to that light.

He found himself drawn to it, hypnotized by it, through and past his fear. It was as if he had never before seen such a thing as this, luminous and distinctly dangerous. He followed it out of the corner of his eye, his gaze still locked with Gozaburo's, as it moved closer to him, slowly, but with a complete surety, inexorable as the flow of time itself.

Fire. It was hope, purity, the grace of God. It was light, after all, a light in the darkness of the stone room.

But even as fire gives off light and sheds warmth, so does it consume and burn. And the souls of the damned were cast into it also, weren't they, into everlasting hellfire in which they would burn until eternity's end. And that's what he was. Damned.

It came, the little flame, came as a judgment upon him, a sentence; and an offering, too, a gift of the supplicant, asking of him what he was and could never be again.

He looked on Gozaburo's face, half-knowing then what he would find there.

He saw no facade of rage there now, only a perfect stillness. And a slight smirk twisting up the corner of his mouth.

It was then that Seto realized what it was he meant to do.

Still smirking, Gozaburo pressed the flame to the soft pale scarred skin of Seto's left arm.

Pain exploded (that was the closest thing he knew to liken it to) like a dying galaxy, trapped beneath his skin. It burned its way through skin and muscle, boiling the very blood that ran through his veins. Burned all the way down to the bone, and charred it soft and black.

His flesh sizzled - actually _sizzled_ - like overheated meat. The sickening smell of burning flesh - his own - filled his nose and mouth, and a wave of nausea washed over him.

He might have screamed then - he must have, he thought, though he was never sure - screamed from the pain or for a help that would never come. But then, all his being was screaming, down to the very core of his soul, one voice united in pain.

He struggled against it, tried to fight or flee, but his arms were chained down and his legs were without any feeling, lost to him. He was trapped. How perfect, how fucking perfect. But then he'd never expect anything less from Gozaburo.

And somewhere beyond the pain, beyond its light and its shadow, he saw Gozaburo's eyes. Laughing at him.

Laughter. He heard it all around him, a ringing jeer, cruel and hard. A laughter damned and damning.

In his mind or in his ears? He didn't know, and perhaps it didn't matter. Both this material world and the one of his mind were equal hells, their demons inescapable. Reality, true and otherwise, was nothing but a nightmare to him, a warped, twisted web in which he found himself caught.

But even then, though he could scarcely see through the pain, even then he refused to take his gaze from Gozaburo's. For to do so would make the man forever the dominant, let him win, and that was something Seto would never do. Gozaburo could break him, but Seto would never let him win.

For an animal beaten and bloodied will either submit, cower in terror of its master, living its life out under the shadow of such brutality...or rise up, snarling, and fight to live with dignity as the proud creature it was born.

And it was then, when pain blinded him and the darkness raged all around him, when he felt as though his very soul was tearing itself from his body, that he spoke.

His voice, grating and thick from disuse and thirst, seemed surprising in the perfect stillness of this place that had for so long lain silent. But it was no surprise to him; it was as if he had always known what he would say. The words formed themselves from truths long known to him and revelations only recently realized, from the very light of his soul.

"You're a tyrant, aren't you, Gozaburo? Terrible as any that has tainted human history. You adopted me thinking that I would be malleable, that would could take me and mold me into a mindless slave trembling before you.

"But you cannot. I am your reflection, in more ways than simple emptiness; I am your own ambition and strength, cast and reflected back at you. So of course I fight you. I am far from being a tyrant, but farther from being a slave.

"Tyrants cannot stand for their rule to be defied because that rule is all they have. They loathe defiance and they fear it.

"So that is why you torture me, and try as hard as hell to break me. Because you know if you don't - and even, perhaps, if you do - that I'll break _you_."

For a moment, there was perfect stillness. Then Gozaburo's face...changed. That was the only way to describe it. 

It twisted, morphed itself into something no more human than a Hallow's Eve mask. Even his laughter would have been preferable, for at least there was something of humanity in it, if only hatred. It was the face of madness that glared back at the child now.

He was fury, raw violence. He could kill the boy if he so wished, and no one would ever find out.

But Seto realized it then. Gozaburo did not want to kill him physically, his body alone. He wanted to murder his very soul.

And he would never stop until he had reduced it to ashes and dust, the remains of a great forest after a fire has taken it. He would never stop until he finally broke him. Never.

They were locked together, the two, as they were once and would forever be. Locked in a combat that would not end until one of them killed the other. Murderer or victim; it was his destiny, his doom, to be one or the other.

__

But I will never let you win, Gozaburo.

Then all his world faded, turned to the nothingness of eternity or oblivion.

__

Black. 

~*~

Seto woke in terror. Fire and ice pounded in his veins. Emotions flashed and screamed in his mind. Dread. Fear. His senses, honed from them, pierced the night.

The room was quiet and dark, lit only by moonlight falling in through the window. He was safe.

__

...Safe...?

With effort, he returned his breathing to normal and lay back down. _The night terrors again. It was only a dream. There is nothing to fear. You're safe. It was only a dream._

But that was a lie, and he knew it. For this dream had been his reality once.

Almost without conscious realization, his fingers crept to the scar. It felt like satin, something not real, something not alive. A third-degree burn. Such things never really healed, did they? Even now, years later, still it burned him sometimes.

The memories, the memories. He squeezed his eyes tight shut, as if he could block them out.

They never left him. By day, at least, they hid, hid the way shadows do under cars and in shady alleyways. They were demons that loathed the light.

But night was their space, their freeing time. It was their home territory, and they were a darkness that descended with the shadows, blacker than a starless midnight. They crept out and surrounded him and trapped him in themselves. And he could never escape them, never be anything more than their victim.

There was a stirring in the darkness. Something awoke.

Seto's eyes snapped open.

A creak, and something stood. The pad of feet on carpet, and a shadow moved towards him.

The memory of Gozaburo's torture was still very much in his mind, the horror still very real.

Past and present blurred. Terror gripped him. Fear took control.

It washed over him, a tide cold as ice. He tried to run, to fight, to do fucking _something_ - anything - and he found he could not. He couldn't even move. With all his will, he tried to force his muscles into moving again, his heart into beating.

And they would not.

He stayed immobile, frozen like a deer in the headlights. God, better for all his night terrors to manifest around him and he be ready to meet them, at least, than to stay like this, betrayed by his body, left to his fate, this dark thing that shuffled closer...and closer....

Screaming. It rent his ears, pierced through to his very soul. Voices, screaming. They'd never stop, never end. Even when he died, he'd still hear them, disembodied from all but their pain, lost in the black oblivion. For the damned remain forever so, and he was forever left to hear their screams, repeating over and over inside his skull. Then he realized who was screaming.

Himself.

And then there was a voice, a voice in the darkness before him. " Seto?! Seto! It's alright, you're safe. Seto, I'm here."

He knew that voice. Shades of gentleness...love? Something in him paused in its screaming and perked up its ears as if it had heard hope's faint crooning through the howl of its own despair.

He fell to silence, the memory of screams still painful on his ears. And there, in the soft pale light of moon and star, there he saw Mokuba.

He seemed so young, his face cast flawless and fair in the gentle illumination. Too young, too pure to have such concern etched onto his features, to ever know the cruelties that lay in the darkness.

But there was knowledge in that soft face, too, of suffering and a life lived in the shadow of fear.

__

Yes, we've both suffered, haven't we, little brother? Broken spirits. Innocence lost. The pain that runs in your very blood. Helplessness. For living in constant terror eats away at your soul, leaves wounds that will never disappear....

Yes, Mokuba understood. He needed no explanation. He understood, and he was here with him, always was, always would be.

Physically awkward, but with a pure self-assurance and a deep tenderness, Mokuba wrapped his arms around his brother and embraced him, protected him and comforted him in the best way he knew how, the only way he knew how. 

Seto yielded, and for the briefest of moments, a smile flitted across his lips. _As I came to free you, locked in the darkness of Pegasus' castle, so you come to me now, locked in the darkness of my own mind._

Gentle and soft, but fiercely protective, Mokuba said, "You're safe now, _niisama_. He's dead, he's gone. He'll never hurt you again."

But Seto knew better, knew what lay behind the black of his closed eyes. The memories, coiled and ready to spring. _And as much as you try, as much as you love me, they'll always be there. For you can't change the past, you can't undo all the things..._he_...did to me._

A face rose up, materialized from the darkness. Gozaburo's face.

A shudder took Seto's body, and his eyes stared wide and unseeing into the impenetrable night. 

__

The memories...they're your legacy, aren't they, Gozaburo? Your final revenge. You'll never let me go.

The eyes burned into his own, the eyes of a man dead and rotting.

God, such hate. How could he have lived with it? How could any mortal creature ever hate so much?

__

But then, you never hated me, did you, Gozaburo? Nor did you love me. Just as you never hated or loved yourself.

He was trembling, he realized. He hugged Mokuba tighter and was held closer also, a cycle clean and unbroken. In this, at least, he was free of the darkness. And there was a fierce light in his eyes now, not of fear or terror, but of defiance.

__

You tried to break me, Gozaburo, beat all the life from my soul. Kill me inside. But you failed; I survived. Because survival is the only revenge I will have.

You hold no power over me anymore. I will not allow it. Yes, the nightmares haunt me, but they are that and nothing more - nightmares, memories of that which was and will never be again. I am not the little child whose life you made hell, no longer. I am the victor.

With a long, shuddering sigh, of release and the relief of it, he closed his eyes again.

The memories were gone - at least for now - scattered, despelled, by...himself? Yes. In his mind, his misted consciousness, he was made of light. He had wings of it, and he was flying now, up, up, through the shades and shadows of the darkness, until he burst through the pall, a thousand miles above the Earth, into the very land of the light itself.

Sometime in the long, unmarked watch of the night, his breathing eased. He drifted off to sleep again, a deep sleep were no dreams came.

__

~*FINIS*~

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Whew, long enough?

Seto: …you get some kind of twisted pleasure out of torturing me, don't you? -_-;

No, I get reviews! ^__________^ Hopefully…

Mokuba: Please, review! Maybe she'll leave me and my brother alone for a while

Yes, please review! ^_^;


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